Jaguar Land Rover to Invest in UK, Keep Auto Plants

By
Motortrend India Staff
|
17 October,2010

Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is set to invest billions of pounds in Britain and has cancelled plans to close one of its auto plants there after reaching a deal with trade unions, the company said on Friday.

JLR said it would significantly increase its model range and overall global volumes, creating thousands of jobs over the next decade. Last year Tata Motors said it would merge two of its three JLR plants in England as part of a plan to tackle falling demand. But the company said business had now improved.

“We have ambitious plans for growth...and this agreement will allow us to accelerate and realise those plans,” said Jaguar Land Rover Chief Executive Officer Ralf Speth. “Our parent company Tata supported us through the recession and our employees also made sacrifices but now we are seeing a great turnaround in the business,” he added.

Europe’s luxury car makers say they are not worried about a possible double-dip recession, predicting that growing numbers of wealthy customers in emerging markets will make up for any weakness in mature markets.

A boom in the premium car market this year has rendered the global financial meltdown, and an accompanying collapse in bonus-fuelled demand from bankers, a distant memory. On Wednesday Porsche SE said its sports car business had earned nearly as much in the fourth quarter alone as it did in the previous nine months.

Francisco Camilher-Carvalho, analyst at IHS Global Insight, said that with new, diversified products in the pipeline and Tata’s established network in India, JLR was well placed to gain market share.

Motor Trend India needs Javascript enabled for it to work optimally. We have detected that Javascript is disabled on your browser. Please enable Javascript to get the full interactive experience of our website.